Trump is no Republican. And if the party has any sense, it should rebel against him

Of the many venerable institutions that Donald Trump has assaulted over the years, perhaps the most egregiously is the Republican Party itself. I can’t bring myself to repeat the famous tape-recorded lines about “grabbing” women and the rest that, I’m sure you recall, emerged so sensationally during the election last year. But I think many Republicans will have a similar sense that their own party has been wantonly violated by this grim human being. He said that he could do anything because he was famous, and so it seems, he has.

Now, the Republicans are starting to suffer some real damage. The most sensational result in the latest elections (not opinion polls) was the loss in the gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey, the very places where modern Republicanism has built a hitherto strong base.

Though he was standing down after an eight-year term, the outgoing (in every sense) Governor Chris Christie will have understood the message sent by the voters of his state. He was, after all, one of the many senior names usurped from any pretensions of national leadership by The Donald last year.

There is a paradox here. Trump is not a Republican, in any true sense – but he is damaging Republican candidates, the Republican cause and besmirching the Republican name. He is, as he sometimes says of his internal opponents, a Rino – Republican In Name Only.

Trump, in case you hadn’t realised, is a Trumpite: running a Trumpite machine and getting support from people who are Trumpites first, Republicans second, Christians third and Americans maybe last.

Even before the run of disappointing results for the GOP, many in his own party were more than willing to defy, criticise and even ridicule him. They did so, after all, when he managed to whip all the other rivals for the Republican nomination last year. Perhaps the most high profile and unprecedented have been the attacks on Trump by his last two Republican predecessors – George HW Bush and George W Bush.

Bush the elder called Trump a “blowhard”, an all-the-more-powerful adjective for being both accurate – Trump is after all an America first bragger – and for its politesse (because we have become all too used to people swearing about Trump). More hurtful must have been Bush Junior's reported disdain that Trump doesn’t understand what it means to be President. To place yourself in a position where you can suffer being patronised by the likes of Dubya is a sort of achievement in itself.

May I continue? Only last month, Tennessee Republican Bob Corker told the media he believes Trump's legacy would be the "debasement of America". The unfortunately named Arizona Senator Jeff Flake hasn’t stinted, either. He sees Trump as "reckless, outrageous and undignified" – hard to argue with.

"We must never regard as 'normal' the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals," he went on, adding his shock at the "flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons". Flake concluded: “There may not be a place for a Republican like me in the current Republican climate or the current Republican party."

That is the wrong conclusion. I mean, it is right in the sense that Trump and the Trumpites are making life uncomfortable for the more liberally-minded traditional Republicans who still remain. Even a Republican with views identical to Ronald Reagan would find life a little difficult in today’s Republican movement.

After successive infiltrations by the religious Right, by the so-called Tea Party tendency and by wave after wave of fundamentalist libertarians, not to mention the iron grip of the gun lobby, the Republican Party is not a “safe space” for many people of moderate views.

All true, but what do you do? You fight back, that’s what.

What does anyone do when they find their party being swamped by alien views, boorish manners and, frankly, slightly unhinged personalities whose ideas and policies will do the country nothing but harm?

You should not walk away. The right answer is to stay, fight and defy them. That is what John McCain did when he cast his vote against Trump’s healthcare reforms. Trump’s proposals are, after all, an ill-disguised exercise in personal vendetta against Barack Obama and all he stands for.

That negative, anti-Obama motivation, including the ludicrous “birthing” movement, is something that has provided the one consistent leitmotif for the entire Trump phenomenon (those jokes a few years back at Trump’s expense by Obama at a White House dinner must have really hurt).

What those proud patriots in the Republican Party must do is fight back, and stand up to the Trumpites and their allies. They need to get religion out of national politics. They need to get real about gun control. They need to re-learn the basics of free enterprise economics, the value of free trade and the benefits of globalisation. They have to re-educate themselves in the now-neglected doctrine of compassionate conservatism.

It is, I concede, more than likely that, come 2020, Trump may win again on the short-term success of his protectionist trade policy and the jobs it will indeed protect. But it will again not be a victory in the national interest for the longer term, nor will it be a true victory for the Republican Party and its better traditions. There is a long march ahead for those fighting for some basic sense and decency in American politics.